Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

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  In early 2014, many writers and journalists were arrested. After staff at Unity Journal reported on the construction of an alleged chemical-weapons factory, the CEO and four journalists were sentenced to ten years’ hard labor, later commuted to seven years. More than fifty others were arrested for protesting those convictions. While Aung Kyaw Naing, a former bodyguard for Aung San Suu Kyi, was reporting on the conflict between Karen rebels and the Burmese army in Mon State, he was taken captive by the army and killed in custody. Another journalist was jailed for a year for “disturbing a civil servant on duty” and trespassing after attempting to interview an education official about a scholarship scheme at a new government school in Chin State. Laws require that newspapers be registered, but the government withholds registration capriciously, so newspapers publish unregistered until they annoy officials, whereupon they get shuttered. Four newspapers were closed down in Chin State in the fall of 2014. When the Bi Mon Te Nay printed an erroneous statement from an activist group claiming that Aung San Suu Kyi had formed an interim government, three reporters and the two publishers received sentences of two years each. Htin Kyaw was sentenced to thirteen years for disrupting public order because he organized a protest march in Yangon.

  In the ranking of countries for freedom of the press, Myanmar’s status has steadily improved. It was 169th out of 180 countries in 2011; 151st in 2012; by 2013, it had been promoted to 145th. But Dave Mathieson, senior Myanmar researcher for Human Rights Watch, noted that two hundred people had been detained in 2014, including peaceful protesters, journalists, and activists. Yanghee Lee, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in Myanmar, reported to the General Assembly that the government continues “to criminalize and impede the activities of civil society and the media,” meting out “disproportionately high” sentences. The writers, artists, and other intellectuals I interviewed in Myanmar had all been released under article 401 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which allows only conditional pardons: they risk having to serve out the remainder of their sentences if they displease the government.

  Ma Thida said, “We are beginning to see how surveillance has changed not only the writer’s thinking, but also the society’s thinking. You cannot trust one another. And when people cannot trust one another, it’s very easy to manipulate them. So the society itself is not yet ready for democracy.” She hadn’t expected that the “reform government” would bring quick freedom, so, like Nay Phone Latt, she wasn’t particularly surprised by the backsliding. But she has had to revise her expectations about the recovery of Burmese society: “Now I see that what we have been missing is a collective dream. Our history is of fighting against oppression: colonialism, the socialist regime, the military regime. We totally forget about what kind of society we truly want to live in. We can only hope for a new generation that has a wider view.”

  The Burmese shake their heads on hearing news of journalists being detained, but they have made their peace with worse. The lack of tremendous optimism in the wake of significant positive change is less remarkable than the equanimity and obdurate quietude that prevail among even those with little hope of better personal fortune. The Burmese had not so much optimism, but neither much pessimism—perhaps a cultural expression of Theravada Buddhist ideals. Despite the lack of a collective dream, the collective character is surprisingly robust: an apotheosis of patient endurance that does not guarantee reform, but that constitutes its very essence.

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  The Rohingya crisis escalated in the lead-up to the 2015 elections. The 969 movement expanded with the introduction of Ma Ba Tha, the Patriotic Association of Myanmar, which professes to defend Theravada Buddhism. Wirathu is one of its prominent members. Persecution by Buddhist radicals has driven many Rohingya to flee, and those who stay face brutal conditions at home and in refugee camps. These people have nowhere to go. An American group filed a lawsuit against President Thein Sein accusing him of genocide. The radical Buddhists attempted to sway the election in favor of Thein Sein’s party and failed in that ambition, but they are hardly likely to disappear.

  The NLD has shown no interest in helping Muslims. Following the elections, a high-ranking party leader, U Win Htein, said, “We have other priorities.” Despite the fact that most of the Muslims have been in Myanmar for generations, he explained, “We have to deal with the Bangladesh government because almost all of them came from there,” adding that they should be “returned.” The NLD did not put forward any Muslim candidates, and for the first time since independence in 1948, the new Parliament has no Muslim members. Muslims have, however, expressed hope that the NLD will provide rule of law, and that with rule of law, their rights will be better respected than they have been previously.

  Since the official dissolution of Myanmar’s ruling military junta in 2011 and the relaxation of restrictions on private publications the following year, 32 daily newspapers, some 400 weekly journals, and about 350 monthly magazines have hit the presses, but many have since closed. Thein Sein’s rhetoric of reform has been belied by the escalating curtailment of press freedom under his quasi-civilian administration. Although many journalists have been released from prison, the laws under which they were convicted remain intact.

  Reporters and publishers have continued to be convicted of vague crimes such as “inciting unrest.” Official prepublication censorship has given way to widespread self-censorship. Reporters who value their freedom have learned to shy away from controversial topics. Any attempt to investigate government corruption, the situation of the Rohingyas, ongoing conflicts with ethnic groups, rapes committed by soldiers, displacement caused by economic development projects, or the lethal aspects of burgeoning Buddhist nationalism represents an invitation to surveillance, harassment, and prosecution—if not by the government, then by aggrieved vigilantes. The new NLD government will have much work to reverse the damage done, both to unjustly persecuted individuals and to the country’s fledgling independent press. But some of the change may be out of their hands, as penetration of Internet access on smartphones has leaped forward in the country, with many people getting their news from Facebook.

  Constitutional reforms that would have allowed Myanmar’s pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi to run for the presidency were blocked, but failed to prevent an NLD electoral victory in November 2015. Popular support for Aung San Suu Kyi had not dimmed since her party’s triumph at the polls in 1990. Her extended house arrest and the constitutional maneuvering designed to bar her from assuming the presidency served only to reinforce the impression that her ascendance was inevitable. The voting was so decisive that the generals declined to challenge it. Nonetheless, the military is still guaranteed one-quarter of seats in the legislature, giving it an effective veto. The interior, defense, and border security ministries remain under the aegis of the military.

  Whether The Lady can be as effective at ruling as she was at opposing remains to be seen. It cannot be predicted whether a leader inclined to keep her own counsel to such a degree will succeed in delegating responsibilities to others. This icon of democracy has already asserted that while she is not president, she will rise “above the president” who “would have no authority”—an erosion of the office that has been denied to her. She has spoken of the constitution disparagingly, calling it a “very silly” document. While the constitution is highly problematic—not least because of clause 59F, which bars her from the official leadership of the country—such disregard for the processes by which bad laws are resolved smacks of authoritarianism.

  Time will tell whether a party consisting largely of individuals with no experience in government can succeed in running a country; how the military and its moneyed allies will respond to policy changes that reduce its leaders’ economic advantage; and how a new Burmese government will address the country’s persistent interracial violence and the inhumane exclusion of lifelong residents from citizenship.

  AUSTRALIA

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  Lost a
t the Surface

  The Moth, 2015

  This book starts with my travels as a child and concludes with my travel with a child. It begins with a dawning lust for adventure and ends with reservations about that impulse toward bravado. Intimations of immortality give way to the certainty of mortality. I grew up.

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  I was a frightened little boy. I did not like fast rides at amusement parks or scary movies or anything that was strange and unknown to me. I became anxious easily. When I was six, Mindy Silverstein’s mother took us both out for a bingo night and I was so nervous that I threw up and she had to bring me home. When we visited Uncle Milton and I was sent out to play with my tough cousin Johnny, I had a panic attack and ran back inside to my parents. Like many other frightened children, I lived in books instead of reality. I watched nature programs on TV and was especially captivated by Jacques Cousteau’s documentaries about life under the sea. I loved other people’s escapades, but I didn’t want my own.

  When I was twelve, my mother took me out to lunch and, apropos of something I have long since forgotten, she ventured that I missed a lot by not being more adventurous. “But, Mom!” I said. “I just ordered eel for lunch!” She replied gently, “Being an adventurous eater is not the same as being an adventurous person.”

  I decided to become adventurous through sheer will. Unlike the majority of people, who grow steadily more cautious as they get older, I’ve become less and less constrained in adulthood. I’ve gone skydiving and hang gliding; I’ve reported from war zones and disasters; I’ve faced the sometimes brutal exposure that accompanies being outspoken about my inner life.

  Learning to scuba dive seemed like a good idea when I landed the assignment to traverse the Solomon Islands. A German friend was visiting us in New York prior to the trip, and we agreed to take scuba lessons together in a public pool on East Ninetieth Street, but then couldn’t make all the given dates. We nonetheless decided to try an open-water dive, for which we drove to a flooded quarry in Pennsylvania that had been festooned, rather creepily, with old school buses, so that candidates for diver certification would have “wrecks” to look at. We’d also have something to think about: drowning children. Misunderstanding our brute of an instructor, I plunged in before I was supposed to, and he ordered us out of the water and walked off the job. We went home having spotted only one submerged bus.

  On our honeymoon, John and I traveled to Zanzibar. Our wedding had left him feeling terrifically upbeat because it had been joyful; it left me feeling incredibly down because it was over. Our first night in Zanzibar, he said, “I can’t stop thinking about our wedding,” and I said, “Neither can I.” He said, “I can’t stop thinking what a beautiful, perfect, joyous experience it was, with so many of our incredible friends cheering us on.” I said, “I can’t stop thinking that it would have been better if we’d put Nicky at table five instead of table six.” John decided that I needed some distraction to bring me out of my evident funk, so he suggested we do the weeklong scuba course offered at our hotel. I went along with it because there didn’t seem much else to do in a Zanzibar resort, but all the complicated diving equipment intimidated me profoundly. It had taken me three tries at a road test to get my driver’s license—after which my mother said that the only reason the inspector had passed me was because he was afraid that if he didn’t, he might have to get in a car with me again. I am dyslexic and could not tell my left side from my right until I got the wedding ring. Jacques Cousteau had made it all look so effortlessly graceful. Now I struggled to learn the names of the various pieces of breathing apparatus and safety gear, and to figure out how to assemble them.

  Then we had to practice what to do if our air supply failed.

  I am good in the face of any crisis that allows me at least a half hour of thought. I can determine a strategy and negotiate my way through complicated situations. I’ve managed to get myself out of police custody in East Berlin, to analyze my way through a bewildering maze of bewildering treatments for unnerving depression, to master the baroque logistics involved in making a family as a gay person. But I am not good at hand-eye coordination or any other split-second instinctual response, and the prospect of having to find my diving buddy and share his air hose when I couldn’t breathe on my own, thirty feet underwater, made me as nauseated as I was at Mindy Silverstein’s bingo night.

  Nonetheless, I learned to dive, and in the years that followed, I went diving whenever we were in a place conducive to underwater sightseeing. I had long aspired to see the much-vaunted Great Barrier Reef in the Coral Sea off Australia’s northeast coast. So when I was invited to give the opening speech at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, I brought John and our son, George, and we arranged a reef visit. My dearly beloved Australian friend Sue Macartney-Snape, a brilliant cartoonist who sketches people’s surface oddities to reveal their most hidden depths, had encouraged me to come to the festival in the first place. With her uncanny knack for putting friends together, she had introduced me to new chums in Sydney, organizing multiple celebrations during my visit. I persuaded her to join us at the reef even though she didn’t care to scuba dive, and she generously offered to stay with George, who had just turned five, while we went off on our expedition. Most of the nicer hotels near the reef don’t allow children—which, given that they are essentially beach resorts, verges on obnoxious. Orpheus Island is one of the few that does, so to Orpheus Island we went.

  Our first full day at the pleasantly laid-back hotel, John and I selected our equipment—the inflatable buoyancy-control device (BCD), which helps one rise to the surface, the air tanks, the regulators through which we’d be breathing, our extra weights to be strung along a nylon belt, and so on—and hopped on the hotel’s commodious motorboat. Sue and George, already building sand castles, waved us off. We were joined by the divemaster and a soft-spoken man from Maryland traveling with his ebullient college-aged daughter. She announced that diving was her favorite recreational activity; when she was far from the sea, she confessed, “I spend way, way too much time in aquariums.” She and her father had made hundreds of dives together, and she proceeded to describe most of them.

  The boat took us first among small islets and then well out into the open sea—far enough from land that we couldn’t see any—before setting anchor so we could descend one by one along the anchor line. The divemaster warned that this area had strong currents and reviewed the dive plan: we’d go down, allow the current to carry us a bit, then be picked up where we surfaced. This arrangement was presented as advantageous on grounds that we’d be able to cover a good distance and see a great deal without exerting too much energy.

  Things got off to an inauspicious start. The man from Maryland’s regulator was not working and he couldn’t breathe through it. Fortunately, he discovered the defect immediately, and he simply hoisted himself back onto the boat to sit out the dive. I was too preoccupied to be unnerved that the hotel staff had sent a guest on an open-water dive with malfunctioning equipment. Down I gamely went. The coral was pretty, though not remarkable, and the fish were colorful, but not nearly so numerous and various as what I’d seen snorkeling at the mouth of the Marovo Lagoon in the Solomons a dozen years earlier. The muscular current had stirred up sand and sediments, so visibility was impaired. The aquarium girl saw a squid and waved us over using the appropriate hand signals for “come look” and “squid,” but we were too late. The sudden dimming of light indicated that the sun had just slipped behind a cloud. Because I’m always nervous underwater, I breathe much more heavily than adept divers do, so my air gauge hit the red zone much faster than the others’. I showed my gauge to the divemaster, who asked in hand signs whether I was all right to go back up and reboard the boat on my own, and with an emphatic okay sign, I indicated that I was. Up I went, making a decompression stop along the way.

  The usual diving protocol is that you surface and wave an arm in the air, then the dive boat comes and picks you up. When I bobbed to the surface, I saw that the
current hadn’t carried us as far as it had seemed thirty or forty feet below. Cheerily, I waved my hand over my head. The youthful captain was looking vaguely in my direction, and I waited for him to motor over. But the boat just sat there. So I waved again, a bit more vigorously. Still the captain stared my way with a glassy expression, and still I continued waving, now using both arms. I raised my mask and took the regulator out of my mouth and tried to shout, but the wind was blowing straight into my face and I knew he couldn’t hear me over the wind and choppy water. I thought of that “whistle for attracting attention” that is always mentioned on airplane life jackets.

  Now remember that a person normally feels exhausted after a dive, and that the Australian sun is fierce, and the waves were not insignificant, and the current was forceful. So I really needed to get out of the water. Channeling late-night television, I tried a Tarzan yell. The captain then walked around to the other side of the boat, which left me staring at a blank prospect.

  When I faced into the wind toward the boat, the waves broke over my head. I’d not previously understood how anyone could drown while wearing a life jacket, but as I pumped up my BCD, I realized that I couldn’t keep myself oriented toward the boat without achieving unwanted hydration of my pulmonary and digestive systems. It was nature’s version of waterboarding. So I turned away from the boat, twisting my body every few minutes to check whether the captain had come back into my view, in which case I would be in his. I waited, and I waited, and I waited, and after about ten minutes, he finally came back and once more appeared to be looking right at me. By now, my waving was worthy of Cirque du Soleil—both arms oscillating rapidly over my head, back and forth and front and back and sideways. I even tried using my flippers to jump partway out of the water, like a sort of flying fish with arms. The captain gazed calmly in my direction for a few minutes, then resumed his little peregrination around the deck.